Identité, langues et savoirs dans Riwan ou le chemin de sable de Ken Bugul

Abstract

This paper, which draws its analytic and hermeneutic postulate from epistemocriticism, studies the mechanism of renegotiation of identity in Ken Bugul’s Riwan ou le chemin de sable (Riwan, or the Sandy Path). It demonstrates that the narrator decides to return to her native land because she is afraid of losing connection with herself. The study analyses the return to native land not as a withdrawal to one’s identity but as a kind of poetizing of one of many various ways of life found within contemporary Senegalese society. The paper explores different forms of representation in cultural Senegalese knowledge through the perspectives of savoir-être (knowledge of how to behave) and savoir-dire (knowledge of how to express) which take into account taboo and customary rituals. These articulations of traditional knowledge are the keys from which the narrator reconnects with her origins and thus manages to reconstruct her ethnic identity.